Confirming the industry's worst-kept secret, Valve CEO Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve is working on its 'Steam Box', a Steam-powered HTPC geared towards console-like gaming. It'll most likely run Linux. "Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he told Kotaku. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room." Steam has 50 million subscribers, so there's a market here. As a comparison: Xbox Live has 40 million subscribers.

No, the question is do you really need $25 million budget to make a game with deep storyline and good interface? Probably not. For example take CD Projekt Red - they made Witcher 1 with very interesting story and brilliant interface. It was targeted for PC and they didn't care about consoles at that point (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=24qJXgiuO1E ).

In the Witcher 2 the story is also great, but the interface suffered a number of degradations because of their attempt to combine PC and console versions. Other than that, Witcher 2 could be on par with the first game interface wise. Only with later updates some of the annoyances in PC version were fixed. It's just an example of bad effects consoles can have on gaming.